Vignette

The floor is slippery and sticky with grease. Above the charcoal grill the dripping extractors roar but the heat is stifling. What a time to be so hung over. As often as I can, I sit on the floor next to the oven trying to quell the queasiness. Every few minutes I have to get up and stir the giant soup cauldron, and check the spare ribs. Opening the oven door brings another blast of heat and a fresh wave of nausea.

The manageress brings an order to the pass and gives me a withering look. I don’t care. I just need to get through this shift.

Downstairs a fairly relaxed lunch service is underway, as a smattering of Notting Hill trendies pick through the menu. Fashionable food, sloppily cooked by an assortment of wannabe musicians, student journalists, and hard-working young Indonesians on their way to unknown destinations. Maybe even some others for whom this is their job.

The bright August sun streams through the windows and hurts my eyes. The smell of burgers and steaks on the grill almost ends me. My fellow chef, another displaced Yorkshireman with the telling nickname of ‘Chalky’, flirts with the manageress, who will subsequently accuse him of unfaithfulness. Their relationship will last all of two months. I haven’t really grasped it yet, but eventually I will realise that I loathe him. There’s nothing as detestable as a member of your own social group who you despise.

There’s a waitress at the pass now – Sophie, a typical product of the affluent NW11 class, private school educated, a bit entitled, pleasant enough but clearly no idea what she’s doing with her life. Why else would she be working here? The final damning fact is that she’s my current girlfriend – we all know how that goes. Slightly modified Northern vowels together with membership of an aggressively ambitious band have a certain cachet with these bored, spoilt girls, but eventually they will wise up.

The owner is an old hippie who has discovered an easy route into capitalism. His laissez-faire attitude extends to providing beer by the case for the kitchen staff, who efficiently work through it over the course of the evening. It’s a young man’s game – and this being the 1980s, it’s all men in the kitchen, and all women serving the customers. There are a couple of guys in their 30s – dinosaurs! - who are part of management and work the cocktail bar. None of this is seen as anything other than the natural order.

I navigate this social landscape much as I imagine a lesser creature would have tackled the primordial swamp – short on reflection, eyes on the prize, any prize.

Eventually six o’clock rolls around and I am released from my sisyphean nightmare.

I head straight to the pub where the Dickensian characters are all in place – Dave The Car, Young Steve, Jumbo Jet. The first drink washes the fog away and the cycle begins anew. Youth – wasted on the young.